Posts tagged with Trust

The social graph is something that the digital world is struggling to understand right now. How important are the connections within your digital social circle? Who are the most important connectors in your graph? How far does influence travel online?

Well, according to a study from Invoke Solutions, it's still real world friends that hold the most sway with consumers online. And while Facebook has made a niche for itself by fostering online relationships between people who are friends or know each other offline, on Twitter there could be trust issues.

You've worked hard building a strong relationship between your business and its customers. They trust that your products and services meet their needs, and more importantly, they trust the people who work for your business.

But what happens when you make a mistake, and that relationship based on trust is put in jeopardy?

Unfortunately, it happens, and it happens quite frequently. Many companies, some with previously stellar reputations, have lost the trust of their customers in the blink of an eye.

The rise of social networking services like Facebook has created
significant digital privacy concerns. And new geolocation-based
services like Foursquare are creating a whole host of new concerns.

But privacy doesn't necessarily have to be a touchy subject for today's
most prominent social networks. Prominent venture capitalist Fred
Wilson, whose firm has invested in Twitter and Foursquare, thinks that there may actually be an opportunity for companies
to charge their users for additional privacy safeguards.

Online florist Arena Flowers recently fell foul of Norton, with its SafeWeb product flagging its website as unsafe for users due to an issue with the site's WordPress blog.

The problem was fixed promptly by Arena Flowers, but the process of contacting Norton and getting the warnings removed was far from perfect, and could have had a serious effect its sales and reputation.

Last week, popular reviews site Yelp announced that it had teamed up
with OpenTable to offer Yelp users the ability to book restaurant
reservations through OpenTable directly on the Yelp site.

A Yelp-OpenTable relationship is one that some have speculated about
for some time now, and given that 29% of the businesses reviewed on
Yelp are restaurants, the integration between the two services seems like a no-brainer.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be the most successful 26 year-old technology entrepreneur in the world right now, but he sure isn't making it look easy. His company finds itself being attacked for its position on user privacy, and the attacks have turned personal.

While Zuckerberg's character has been called into question before, the increased scrutiny on Facebook seems to be producing a steady stream of facts that don't show Zuckerberg in the best light.

In today's internet-enabled world, your 'reputation' is arguably more important than it has ever been in the past. Increasingly, information about you and your business will find its way online, and what people say about you online has the potential to become a significant asset or liability.

So it's no surprise that 'online reputation management' is a hot area. But as with SEO and social media, many mistakes are made.

The BBC’s strategic review has created a lot of fuss – especially around the closure of 6 Music and the supposed “halving” of its website.

To save you having to read the review, here’s what it actually says about the BBC’s online presence (and given the amount of confusing repetition in the report, I should be given a medal for saving you having to read it – can I suggest getting some more editors for the next strategic review?)

Trustmarks are the images or logos that retailers can place on their websites to show that they have passed various security and privacy tests, and reassure customers that it is safe to shop on the site.

But how relevant are these logos from organisations like Verisign or McAfee? Have customers even heard of them? Would other security reassurances do the same job?

Just as marketers increase their spending on social media marketing comes potentially discouraging news: consumers are trusting their friends a whole lot less.

According to AdAge, the 2010 Edelman Financial Services U.S. Trust Barometer found that only 25% of those surveyed considered friends and peers to be credible sources of information. That's down from 45% in 2008.